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Robin Hornby holds a degree in Aeronautical Engineering and began his career as a systems engineer with a major computer vendor in the UK. He moved to Canada in 1977, and worked in the telecommunications sector before joining an international IT consulting firm where his interest in project management took shape. In 1997 he set up his own consulting company and enjoyed a variety of senior project engagements, including assignments in several countries overseas. He is the author of Ten Commandments of Project Management and Commercial Project Management. Robin may be reached by Email at tmi@telus.net and his web site can be found at tmipm.com. |
IntroductionThis is the second part of my previous discussion on quality, see my paper Did You Give Up on Quality? published here in May 2019. This paper is a 9‑minute read that describes four quality models, focusing on the inherent quality requirements for projects. In the first part of my discussion I noted some of the challenges faced by the project manager (PM) in taking a leadership role on quality, e.g., a cultural setting not aligned with the prerequisite disciplines; management inattention; definitional confusion; reliance on add-on processes; and a sense of PM disempowerment arising from imposition of corporate initiatives. The solution, I argued, is to distinguish between product and project quality and to then apply objective thinking based on a new project model. Think of product quality as the aggregation of tangible quality factors possessed by the product, and think of project quality as an intrinsic attribute of a project's fundamental elements. The intent of this paper is to model quality for each of those elements, review some of the techniques and methods provoked by this fresh view, and so put quality back in its rightful place.
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